Fraud case judge attacks 'targets culture'

A judge yesterday criticised the government's "target-driven culture" as he jailed a no-smoking adviser for 18 months for pocketing £90,000 from the NHS for claims based on bogus clients.

Judge John Hillen said the health scheme, designed to convince addicts to stop smoking, relied on members of the public with little training and was distinctly amateurish and cavalier.

"This scheme has properly been described as pseudo-medical," he said. "To pay lay people, albeit briefly trained, as stop-smoking counsellors for ... spending a few sessions with smokers is an astonishing way to spend public money."

The defendant, Harry Singer, 55, had recognised the lax regime, run by Kensington and Chelsea primary care trust, the judge said, and invented an army of imaginary smoking "quitters".

The scheme gave him a chance to "print money", much of which he had used to pose as the local philanthropist and both win respect, friends and influence, and escape failures in his life.

Singer chalked up an "unprecedented performance" that was 27 times better than the next-best adviser, and won a 2006 nomination for the Stop Smoking Supporter Award. He claimed £45 for each of the 2,017 imaginary "successes", all achieved within six months. But his greed seeded his downfall when those running the project, trying to find out why he was so good, discovered that most of his clients had never heard of him; they had been conned into giving their details to paid canvassers "gathering views on the new smoking ban", and that information then had been effectively hijacked.

Kensington and Chelsea Primary Care Trust's management of the scheme "without any checks" was "an extraordinary derogation of responsibility", the judge said at the trial at Blackfriars crown court, London. He added: "This was all driven by the need to meet targets and it is a feature of the target-driven culture of the governments of this country that it can lead to the distortion of proper functions and can lead, as in this case, to the opportunity for fraud."

The court heard that many of Singer's "clients" had never smoked, while others he had allegedly cured with half a dozen phone calls had lost the habit years before. Among them was an art gallery owner, Robert Tannock, who had given up nearly 25 years earlier, and a person who was on honeymoon abroad while supposedly getting support sessions in London.

Singer, of Earls Court, London, said he had genuinely believed some clients had had support sessions from his canvassers (though they were not qualified for that) and that others had lied, by claiming not to have signed up to the scheme at all.

Denying he was "money driven", he said: "I have been a successful businessman in my life. I have had the Porsche, the gold Rolex watch and a home in Chelsea. Now all I want to do is help the community."

The former caretaker, who spoke of being a former manager for Shell and of once having three oil trading firms, told jurors he was now importing Mongolian vodka. But the trial heard he had been on jobseeker's allowance during the fraud.

Singer was convicted of 18 specimen false accounting charges between March and October 2006, and of one count of concealing criminal property.

Passing sentence the judge said: "I know the jury and I and anyone else listening to this case would have been appalled at the cavalier way in which the taxpayers' money was dealt with by the Kensington and Chelsea primary care trust." Even after the trust was told something was amiss "the fraud was allowed to continue, with the result a large sum of public money designated for health care was lost". Press Association